SAS University Edition – free for non-commercial use (hear, hear)

SAS University Edition – free for non-commercial use (hear, hear)

A retired friend with extensive SAS experience asked me, what free or open-source programme similar to SAS was available. After I hadn’t used SAS much over the last years, I did some research and actually found out that SAS is offering the SAS University edition [1] for free for non-commercial use (as it seems since 2014) for Windows, Mac OS, and Linux.

At first I was a bit doubtful since I remembered the free SAS Learning Edition which was more of a marketing stunt and mostly useless, but after installing the SAS University Edition in a virtual machine and connecting SAS Studio through a browser on Linux Mint 19.1, I have to say, it was a positive surprise. SAS University edition includes SAS Studio, Base SAS, SAS/STAT, SAS/IML, SAS/ACCESS, SAS/ETS and offers also Jupyter notebooks for various kernels (default SAS and Python). It seems that the pressure from open-source programs like R and Python, with which new generations of students grow up, required SAS to become more open to succeed.